A Complexity Framework for Self-Engineering Systems

Abstract

To ensure extended useful life of systems during pandemics such as Covid-19, systems independent of traditional maintenance, repair and servicing will be required. Ambitious new designs are needed, such as self-engineering (SE) systems to automatically respond to return lost functionality and improve product resilience without human intervention. Development in SE has focused on self-healing materials, self-reconfiguring electronics and self-adapting robotics. There has been little work to evaluate SE systems holistically and develop new design tools for creating new SE systems. This paper presents a framework for evaluating the complexity of SE systems and the validation of the framework with expert interviews. There was agreement between experts and the authors for 21/24 of factors for the eight SE examples (four biological and four engineering) evaluated using the framework. Disagreements in results were caused by a lack of knowledge on the system being evaluated or misunderstanding about the system operation.

A literature survey of the robotic technologies during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…Robots are also recommended to perform cleaning tasks to avoid human-to-human contact [ 89 ]. Ultraviolet surface disinfection was demonstrated in some countries and 99.99% disinfection rate was achieved in 15 minutes in the hospital ward room [ 3 ].…”

Design and complexity evaluation of a self-cleaning heat exchanger

“…The SE complexity framework presented in [21] was used to design an SC HX system. Three different factors are used in the framework, repeatability, redundancy and self-control; for each factor, a high, medium and low level were designed.…”

“…However, identifying and managing rather than reducing design complexity can be useful because complexity can be needed for innovative or competitive products [20] . An existing framework for identifying complexity in SE systems highlighted three key factors that contribute to complexity [21] . Firstly, repeatability, the quantity of times a SE system can respond to a lost function.…”

“…The SE complexity framework outlined in Section 1.1 [21] defines high, medium and low complexity for redundancy, repeatability and self-control. Here specific levels for the SC system are outlined; the different levels can be seen in Table 1 .…”

An overview of self-engineering systems

“…Further investigation would be needed to find the most suitable metric or combination of metrics. Effectiveness properties could be linked to the three SE complexity factors identified in previous research (Brooks and Roy 2020): repeatability, redundancy and self-control.…”